122,045 research outputs found
Environmental humanities
Full text linkThe term “environmental humanities” was coined early in the new millennium. It describes diverse forms of research, teaching, and public outreach spanning several humanities disciplines, from philosophy and anthropology to history and large parts of human geography. Historically, the humanities have exploredpeople’s distinctly “human” characteristics over and above their shared biological capacities. For most of their twentieth-century history, humanities disciplines tended to bracket environmental issues: like the social sciences, they mostly analyzed human ideas and activities separately from nonhuman things such as climate, water, and forests. The environmental humanities challenge this bracketing, noting that our “humanity” is achieved in relationship with the biophysical world, in both a symbolic-hermeneutic and a material sense.In recent years, the environmental humanities have grown in size. They have also become more institutionalized within and between numerous countries. Additionally, significant and ongoing attempts to make them more visible and influential have occurred. In large part, this is because escalating human impactson the Earth have instilled real urgency among many humanists. They wish to shape the “conversation of humankind” that will, they hope, be sufficiently rich and inclusive to allow humanity to navigate through what is called “the Anthropocene.” According to a number of geoscientists, this is the new planetary epoch humans have inadvertently created. As the epoch unfolds, it could threaten human wellbeing on a very large scale, having already involved massive change to the nonhuman world. This entry offers a comprehensive overview of the environmental humanities. It first defines and traces their evolution since the late 1960s before explaining their recent expansion. It then identifies arguments in favor of the environmental humanities. It goes on to consider recent recommendations made about their future trajectory. It ends with a briefdiscussion of how geographers are shaping this large and complex field of research, teaching, and public outreach. No one discipline dominates work in the environmental humanities, but geographers have been key players for some time and will remain so for the foreseeable futur
Vulnerability and resilience to environmental change: ecological and social perspectives
No full textA Companion to Environmental Geography is the first book to comprehensively and systematically map the research frontier of 'human-environment geography' in an accessible and comprehensive way. Cross-cuts several areas of a discipline which has traditionally been seen as divided; presenting work by human and physical geographers in the same volume. Presents both the current 'state of the art' research and charts future possibilities for the discipline. Extends the term 'environmental geography' beyond its 'traditional' meanings to include new work on nature and environment by human and physical geographers - not just hazards, resources, and conservation geographers. Contains essays from an outstanding group of international contributors from among established scholars and rising stars in geography. © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Industrial Districts: Past, Present, and Future
No full textSince the 1970s, Industrial Districts (IDs) have emerged as a socioeconomic concept todescribe and explain territorial phenomena characterized by an industrial specializationalongside cooperative relationships between enterprises, local institutions, and socialforces. A number of empirical studies have highlighted many aspects that havecontributed to the development of IDs, including labor market, training, and familystructures, often linked to the rural footprint and its various forms of persistence, not tomention associations, trade union relations, institutions, and local banks.Transformations in global systems do not cancel IDs; rather they radically transform andadapt themselves to face new conditions and challenges. The process of territorialinstitutionalization, in its development in time and space, does not seem to be ended, butrather endless
What is Safe? Cultural Citizenship, Visual Culture and Risk
Full text linkQuestions of cultural citizenship and risk have become central to contemporary sociological debates. This paper seeks to relate these concerns to a discussion of ecological citizenship and questions of visual and commercial culture. In the first section, I argue that ecological citizenship needs to avoid a moralistic rejection of the pleasures of contemporary visual and consumer culture. Such a possibility I argue has become evident in recent debates on the risk society. However, I argue despite Beck's realisation that questions of risk become defined through contemporary media his analysis remains overly distant from more everyday understandings. In order to address this question, I seek to demonstrate how an interpretative understanding of visual culture (in this case the 1995 film Safe) might help us develop more complex understandings of the competing cultures of risk and citizenship.Cultural Citizenship, Ecological Citizenship, Power, Privatisation, Representation, Risk, Visual Culture
A Multi-Language Comparison of Influences on Author Verification using Character N-Grams
No full textWe create a new multi-language corpus for author verification based on Wikipedia talkpages, and evaluate the influence that differences in topic and time have on character n-gram author profiles. Topic alignment between two texts is found to increase author verification precision, and an authors writing style is found to change over time, but not more significantly after 3 years than after 1 year.Information ArchitectureWISElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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